


Isn’t It Pretty to See Magic Untamed

by popi_finnigan



Category: SKAM (Norway)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, F/F, Mental Health Issues, SKAM WLW Mini Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 00:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20201041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popi_finnigan/pseuds/popi_finnigan
Summary: Imagine a world where everyone has magic, then imagine that no one is allowed to use it.People insist that magic led to wars, dictatorships, and basically every bad thing ever happening throughout the human history. So they banned the use of it.Now imagine that not everyone agrees with this sentiment (that’s not hard to imagine, is it?), certainly not the group namedLos Losers. This is a secret, underground organization formed by five girls; all of them different but all of them equally essential in leading a revolution against the total ban of magic use.This short story focuses on one of the girls, Vilde, and tells how she became a revolutionist from the girl who was afraid of magic all of her life. The change might have something to do with another girl, one with a bright laugh and auburn hair…Written for the SKAM WLW Mini Bang





	Isn’t It Pretty to See Magic Untamed

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, Julia, for organizing a Big Bang event once again. You're truly a hero. <3

Everyone knows us, but no one knows our names, or where we came from. They only know us as _Los Losers_, they see our magic, they hear about us in the news, they loudly cheer our art, they scream the hashtags we use; they admire us. But the more I think about it, the more certain I am that their love is not about us but about the _idea_ of us. An underground group of girls who use their magic freely, when everyone else takes suppressants for it… I admit it sounds cool. But the reality behind our myth? They have no clue about it.

I am glad for this, because if people knew where _I_ came from and who _I_ was before I joined the girls, they would not like me one bit. And that’s it, isn’t it, how the truth works? It always ruins everything. A backstory is like a magic trick explained, once it’s exposed how you have done it, you’ll lose all the mystery, all the wonderful bits.

Then why am I telling you this? Well, mostly because Sana said you could use this story right now. And well, if someone knows things like this, it’s Sana. So here we go. 

Hi, my name is Vilde Lien Hellerud, and I’m—and I’ll start from the beginning. I hope that’s alright with you.

*

Let me start with this.

I never thought that magic was inherently bad. Did I agree that everyone should suppress it? Maybe. But I’m not sure I spared enough thought for the matter to even have an opinion on it. I mean, logically… All of us were born with magic; I could see how some of us might have been able to handle it better than others. I was merely among those ‘others’. Or, at least, this was what I firmly believed in all my life. It was fine. I never wanted to do anything with magic anyway.

Magic was like a storm to me, and for all I cared, others may have walked into the heart of the tornado, but I—I looked for a shelter. I took the prescribed suppressants as diligently as I brushed my teeth. If something triggered me to use accidental magic, I scribbled down the possible causes and avoided them carefully in the future. I even attended the “not compulsory but highly-recommended” seminars on how to resist using magic. The seminars had ridiculous titles like _“Unmagic Ourselves”_, _“Play hockey, not God”_ and my personal favorite, _“If You Cannot Pull Off Pointy Hats, Don’t Use Magic”_, but they were honestly helping.

From as long as I could remember, magic was an unwelcome guest in our house, even when Dad still lived with us. Actually, he was the worst among us. He would go into long rants about the damages magic did throughout history (disregarding the fact that not magic itself did those things but people) and how it should be illegal not to take suppressants for one’s magic (disregarding also the fact that some people could suppress their magic just fine without taking any medication). I did not listen to these rants; no, my apprehension towards magic came from my mom. She did not complain about magic, she did not even hate it as much as I could tell. Instead, she feared it, and with good reason; her mental health always got worse whenever she performed magic, unintentionally, of course. Turning the lights on in a room without ever touching the switch panel, flipping the pages of a book with a blink of an eye, she did that accidental sort of magic a lot of others did too and could easily get away with as long as it happened in the privacy of their own home. Only in my mother’s case, she didn’t get out of the bed for days after these incidents occurred.

I often sat at the door of her room, not wanting to intrude but still keeping an eye on her. Mostly I felt useless. But sometimes—it sounds selfish that I was even thinking about this, and wasn’t thinking about her, but sometimes it felt like a promise. _This is what your life will look like._ Gosh, I’m awful, but I was afraid that unless I keep my magic under strict control, I was going to end up just like my mom, feeling boneless and heavy at the same time, shaking with tears, then, slipping into days-long sleeps, buried under the merciless waves the storm of magic leaves behind.

Fear. That’s maybe the closest I could get to describe how I also felt about magic in those days. I feared it, so I avoided it.

Then Eva happened.

*

The first snow of the year arrived on a November day, and I was running late.

I remember I was waiting for my tram to finally arrive, surrounded by many equally frustrated others. I had a shift to pick up in half an hour and I could not afford being late. 

At the time I juggled three jobs: one at a grocery store nearby, one in a coffee shop (that was where I was headed), and I also tutored two high school students in French. Dad at this point was practically non-existent, while Mom was doing more poorly than ever. This not only meant that she had lost another job, but also that she needed more magic suppressants, more than what the government provided for free. In short, I could not risk losing any of my jobs, and certainly not because the public transport in Oslo _‘lost its shit as soon as the first snowflake hit the ground’_, as Dad used to say. That was probably the only sensible thing he ever said.

Standing at the tram stop, I was multi-tasking: biting my nails _and_ checking the time on my phone every ten seconds, oh, and drowning in my own anxieties. None of this meant that I could have possibly missed the moment it started – Eva’s magic. (Not that I knew at the time that it was specifically _Eva’s_ magic.)

It was like a scene from Wizard of Oz, the one where the wind swoops up Dorothy’s house and flies it straight to the Land of Oz, only this time it was the snow from the tram tracks that got sent spinning in the air. Thousands of snowflakes dancing out of the way of the tram’s route – it was a magical sight. Yeah, it was clear as day that the wind was born out of magic. Everything was still and unchanging but that narrow path where the tracks ran.

The wind lasted maybe a minute or so and it was accompanied by gasps and loud bewilderment coming from people standing at the stop, and only when the wind continued its way in the street and we lost sight of it, the first voices of indignation arrived.

Performing any kind of magic was forbidden.

Later that day the crime ring, _Los Losers_, took the credit or blame, depending on which way one looked at it, for the action.

Little side note here. At first only the most aggressive politicians called them a _crime ring_ but when Noora Amalie Sætre, star reporter of Dagbladet, started using the term, it spread like wild fire, and soon enough every news outlet referred to them as a crime ring. Personally, I feel like a crime ring should have been bigger, but insisting on using this term made sense; it vilified _Los Losers_ further. It also made them look like infinitely more dangerous.

But anyway, crime ring or not, _Los Losers_ announced their involvement in the magic performed that morning on their Instagram account. The mysterious wind apparently occurred all over Oslo and restored the normal operation of the public transport system in less than an hour. Not that the authorities would ever admit to any of that.

The announcement was signed by a flower emoji, which, as I learned much later on, was the proof that the magic was Eva’s doing.

*

The second time I was confronted with Eva’s magic was albeit less dramatic but screamed destiny and significance all the same.

You know how much time it takes for the local authorities to erase the physical evidence of any _Los Losers_ related magic? Most likely you don’t, given that usually the traces of the actual magic are gone by the time the general public even realizes something has happened. Only the social media posts remain, those, no matter how hard the authorities try, cannot be erased.

Of course, there are obvious incidents with many eyewitnesses like the cleaning of tram tracks, there isn’t much to do against those, but these types of magic are rare, understandably so. Having witnesses to your illegal activities is a sure way to get caught, after all. 

No, _Los Losers_ perform most of their magic sneakily, in obscure ways, at obscure places. One had to be extremely lucky to catch them before there was nothing left of them, only posts and photos on the internet. Lucky like I was with the flower graffities by the Sognsvann Lake.

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon. Mom slept through the day, exhausted of—existence, probably, and I, for once, didn’t have any shifts and any classes, so I headed out for a walk to Sognsvann Lake. Mom used to take me there all the time when I was younger. It was our little escape from the world, Mom used to say, or what she didn’t say but meant by that, from Dad. 

There was this little game we always played, too: conjuring up stories about everyone we saw on the way. Mom used to call it “balancing act”. You see, the world is full of prejudice and bigotry. People tend to think awful, judgmental things about other people even before they exchanged a word with them, so, to balance it out, we only thought of nice things. And life is full of tragedies, how could it not if you are expecting the worse even before anything happened, so, we took it upon ourselves to only come with stories that ended with _“and they lived happily ever after” _. 

That Sunday afternoon I returned to this game. It was infinitely less fun playing it alone, but you know what they say… _You only need a bit of imagination, and every pretend-life you create for yourself will be better than the one you are actually living._ Do they say that? Or is it just me?  


Anyway. That was when I came across the flower graffities. To be fair, they were hard to miss. Bright blue lilies, with huge, soft pedals, spray-painted on the side of a wooden cabin… They certainly stood out of the brown-green-white palette of the camping surrounding the lake. I was mesmerized by them even before I took a step closer to the cabin. Then, I realized—

The lilies were alive. The pedals were slow-dancing in any imaginary breeze, whispering something to anyone who dared to listen to them. I stepped even closer.

“You are strong,” the lilies said.

“You are good,” they said.

“You are beautiful,” they said.

“You are worthy,” they said.

I stumbled back astonished.

The world we lived in might have been full of awfulness and _“then it all went to hell”_-s, but the world _Los Losers_ tried to create? I am not sure I, at the time, believed that such world could exist, but I think in that moment and only for that moment, standing there, facing magically born, spray-painted lilies that were whispering kindness and doing their own balancing act, I pretended that I did.

The lilies were gone by the next morning, and only a muted video of them remained on the _Los Losers_ Instagram page. On the video, one was able to see the lilies moving, but their words… those were a secret I shared only with few.

*

Chris used to joke that I missed the fun parts of their operation, and sure, I often wished I could have been with them from the start, but in all honesty, most of the things that defines us now began when I met the others.

This was when _Los Losers_ started really cementing themselves in people’s minds. This was when they were no longer a whisper among those few activists who questioned the total ban of magic use, they were no longer just a mention at the end of the newspapers, a scoff or a punch line when elders talked about our generation and about how spoiled or stupid or naïve or who knows what else we were. No, Los Losers were not something to be ignored.

They moved to the front of the newspapers, from chitchats of only the radicals into the conversations of everyday people. It was not a ridiculous idea any more that people were fighting against the reality most of us always had known (that everyone had magic but no one was allowed to use it), it became a fact. I think this was the most dangerous effect _Los Losers_ had, and this was why politicians, authorities, the press, everyone, whose power relied on the absurd status quo we had reached regarding our magic, was hell-bent on fighting them as fiercely and mercilessly as they could.

They often compared _Los Losers_ to the _Tøyen Bandits_, you know those guys who did the flaming (like for real flaming… no comment) graffiti in Tøyen a few years ago. Or, later on, the _Penetrators_ appeared and started using magic for their stupid pranks. But I think deep down the opponents understood the difference between those hooligans and _Los Losers_. They did big, demonstrative magic for fun (and because they were assholes, I mean come on, a graffiti that could burn people and could not be erased or put out), while _Los Losers_ performed magic with a crystal-clear message: not all magic is bad. _Los Losers_ solved traffic jams and delays, fixed communication systems, restored electricity when a storm cut the power in a neighborhood, healed animals in the zoo, rebuilt houses that time made crumble, made flower graffities that whispered kind words to you if you walked close enough.

People knew they were dangerous.

*

At first glance, Eva was the opposite of danger. She was like the summer. Sure, she was beautiful, auburn hair, kind eyes and that type of figure any girl would have killed for, but the first thing I noticed about her was her bright laugh. You know those laughs that just sound—right? Don’t get me wrong, if it’s not horribly forced and awkward, one thinks of any laugh as genuine. But not after one hears Eva’s laugh, because every laugh after hers feels like at least a half-lie.

Sana, much later on, said to me, that Eva was the one who believed in magic. Of course, everyone knew that magic was real, but knowing and believing were two very different things. (And if anyone, Sana would understand the difference.) Maybe this does not make sense to you, but if you knew Eva, it would. After all, she was the one that made me stop being afraid of magic.

Her laugh reflected her belief in magic; it was uninhibited and hopeful, it was the sound of a world filled with never-ending warm summers, it reminded me of the easiness of a nap in the middle of the day, of the comfort of a hug, of walking barefoot in soft grass, of possibilities stretching ahead as far as the horizon reached. And what’s more, her laugh, just like her magic, made you believe that a world like that could exist.

I first heard her laugh the day Eva came into the coffee shop while I was bartending. She was talking on the phone, smiling and laughing all the way through whatever conversation she had, and—see, it’s not like I fell in love as soon as I heard her laugh, it was not love at first sight or something like that… It was more like her magic in that wretched November morning, like Dorothy and her wind. Hearing that laugh, seeing that smile turned my whole world on its axis and sent me spinning into the unknown.

I knew it was a moment of significance.

Eva hanged up the phone, and stepping forward to the counter she said _hi_.

*

Our first date was a disaster. No, I’m not lying, it was an absolute, utter disaster. It didn’t even have a promising start.

You know those coffee shop, rom-com worthy meet-cutes you sometimes hear about? The ones about a bartender and their customer? Where the customer smiles brightly, and flirts so kindly and lovingly that the bartender cannot help but falling in love with them and scribbles down their own number on the coffee cup with a romantic message? 

Well, there is a clear common thread in those stories. The bartender is suave as hell.

I am not.

I wanted to say something cool and confident to Eva, something like _“You have a lovely smile”_, but instead, I managed only a high-pitched _“hello”_. I wanted to return her smile in a sort of enchanted but still totally calm way, but instead, I was a mess of jitters. I wanted to do my job as seamlessly as always, at least that, come on, but instead, yeah, you’ve probably already guessed it, I poured Eva’s coffee on her hand. And that’s just for starters. I was so busy making sure a) she was okay, b) she won’t cause a scene and get me fired (I could not afford being fired—have I already mentioned this?) that I made a complete fool of myself. I don’t know how we ended up having coffee together later that day, only that we really should have just postponed the whole thing.

Imagine me, five hours later, at the end of my ship, now sitting opposite to Eva, without my apron on, still profoundly apologizing for the coffee incident. And imagine Eva, awkwardly pretending that she did not just ease the pain the hot coffee caused her through magic the moment it touched her skin. We fumbled through some small talk, including the topic of what it was like working in a coffee shop. The worst wasn’t my super boring answer, no, it was the fact that I somehow managed to insinuate that I was having coffee with Eva in fear of her making a complaint to my manager. The only good thing I did on that date was chasing after Eva when not much later she found an excuse to leave.

“Eva, wait!” I shouted and the coffee shop’s door shut behind me with a loud bang. I didn’t pay any mind to it. “I didn’t mean it like that. The complaint thing. I mean I’d appreciate if you didn’t—but that’s not the point.”

Eva pulled her hat down, and stepped closer to me. The freshly fallen snow crackled under her boots.

“Then what’s the point?”

I glanced back at the coffee shop.

“You know those coffee shop meet-cutes?” I asked turning back to her. “Where the bartender and the customer instantly click? And the bartender is super confident and writes down her number on the cup? And the whole thing is cute and not awkward?”

Eva hesitantly nodded with a smile tugging in the corner of her lips.

“So,” I sighed, “can we pretend we had one of those?”

Eva considered this.

“I don’t think I can,” she said finally.

“Oh.”

“See, if I had a meet-cute like that, I’d probably spend my evening staring at the cup I got from my super confident bartender. It just—it really breaks the illusion that I _don’t_ have such cup.”

“Oh,” I said again, this time ten times more brightly. “Do you think that, having such cup, you could pretend you got it a few hours earlier than you actually did?”

Eva smiled at me, then, somberly nodded.

“I think that’s manageable. I have quite a good imagination.”

Understatement of the year, but anyway, that’s how it happened that I ran back to the coffee shop for a cup. This time, an empty one, to avoid any further incident.

Eva still has the cup. It’s evidence we can’t leave behind, so my name and number have been crossed over with a big, black marker, but the accompanying message has remained. 

_ “You have a lovely smile.” _

*

I wish I could say that after the rocky start, our relationship was a smooth sail. But no. Instead, what came in our way were more rocks. That sounded weird, sorry. Scratch that metaphor. But you get what I was trying to say. We had issues to work through.

You would think that our biggest conflict was magic, or the fact that you know, Eva was a part of an illegal, magic-using organization, but we were not quite there yet.

No, in the beginning it was about me and Mom. 

It started with me not being able to dodge Eva’s questions about why I had three jobs. They were understandable questions, I could not even blame her for the suggestions that I should drop one of the jobs, or take at least less shifts, or, I don’t know, sleep more than four hours a night. It wasn’t Eva’s fault that I didn’t tell her why all of it was necessary. But after a while I could not wave off her concerns or change the topic without being a complete bitch about it. So I confessed.

We were walking along Akerselva, the river half-frozen beneath us. It looked like a patchwork blanket, ice and regular water eccentrically sewn together without any logic or pattern. 

“It’ll be all frozen soon,” Eva remarked. 

I yawned. It wasn’t a reaction to what Eva said, rather the consequence of my above-mentioned sleep habits.

“Hey, now,” Eva gasped in mock offence. “It wasn’t a conversation starter. Just a mere observation.”

Although I knew she was only messing with me, I took her hand in mine. 

“I’m sorry,” I said with an apologetic smile. “I’m just—“

“—tired,” Eva finished, and her grip tightened around my fingers. “You usually are.”

“Yeah, I mean working does that to you.”

“It’s not healthy. You should—take a break or something. Recharge and I don’t know, do something for fun.”

“Take a break?” I repeated, and stopped in my tracks. Eva stopped, too, looking worriedly at me. “I can’t take a break.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Oh, I don’t know, because suppressants don’t grow on trees?!” I knew I raised my voice, I knew I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t Eva’s fault, it wasn’t Eva’s fault, it wasn’t—I could not calm down. “They are expensive, and I need all the income I can get to keep buying enough for my mom and me, so. No, I can’t take a break.”

Eva didn’t even flinch; she held my angry gaze and wasn’t willing to back down so easily.

“The government provides a daily doze for everyone,” she said.

“That’s one pill a day,” I pointed out. “Mom needs more than that.”

Eva furrowed her eyebrows, and I sighed.

“She has depression. Magic makes it worse.”

“And they don’t give people with mental illness more medication? If you explained the situation to someone… To your mom’s therapist, or a doctor, or something?”

“Oh yeah, damn. I’ve been working myself to death, when I could have just done that! Why didn’t I try that?” My voice was full of sarcasm, and gosh, I had really thought avoiding this whole topic would have made me less of a bitch than I was in that moment? Way to miscalculate. “I’ve done that, okay? I’ve done everything! And buying those stupid pills is the only way!”

I felt Eva’s hands on my waist, then, she propelled me forward into a tight hug. I was angry with her, still shaking with adrenalin, but I could not stop myself from returning that hug and lean my head on Eva’s shoulder. The ice beneath us was crackling under the weight of some bird, and I heard the whispers of people passing us on the bridge.

I didn’t know when I had started crying, only that Eva’s coat was wet with my tears when seconds or maybe whole minutes later I lifted my head.

For a moment, we simply stared at each other, me teary-eyed, Eva with the look of someone ready for a fight. Not against me but the world. (I’m stupidly fond of Eva’s laugh, but this look is easily my second favorite thing about Eva. She could make the whole world kneel before her with it.)

Then, Eva smoothed a stray of hair under my hat.

“What if you could give your medication to your mom?” she asked, her expression fierce as ever but her voice was more on the fence of hopeful than anything else. “I know how to control my magic without suppressants. I can teach you.”

I stepped aside, brushing off Eva’s touch. I heard the ice crack. The bird probing its steps on it flew up in frenzy.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Why not?”

I sighed and started walking again. Eva was right behind me.

“Just leave it, Eva.”

And she did. For while.

*

We were sitting at the back of Tram 12, aimlessly travelling around Oslo. We were also playing a dangerous version of _Truth or Dare_. The rules were simple: we had to guess a truth about each other, and if guessed wrong, we did something the other dared us to.

You know it would have been epic if I had just blurted out then and there that _ ‘hey, you are one of _Los Losers_’ _. I didn’t though, because at the time I didn’t know.

It would have been cute if Eva had said that I had a lovely smile, too. But she didn’t, because she wore that _“fight me”_ glare instead.

So I guessed that Eva still had the cup I gave to her (true), and Eva guessed that not only my mom took more suppressants than the provided dose but I did too. Also true.

“I did the math,” Eva said. “Yes, the suppressants cost a crazy lot. But not enough to warrant three jobs, Vilde. So unless you are stocking extreme amounts, you take more as well. Don’t you?”

For a few seconds, I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to anyway. Eva knew she was right. The tram was passing by Aker brygge, and to distract myself from Eva’s stare, my eyes followed the shapes of the ships docked there. Finally, I relented and reacted to what Eva said. Not that I’m proud of that reaction.

“And what do you want me to do about it?”

“I just don’t understand why you do it unless—“

“No,” I jumped in. “I mean I don’t have depression, or any mental illness if that’s why you’re thinking,” I clarified.

“Then why?”

The ships wavered in my view, and I angrily wiped my eyes that were already welling up. 

The truth behind Eva’s truth was right there. I sighed and said it. “Depression runs in family. What if I—“

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Eva regarded me for a moment, then, her face softened. “You must know that it doesn’t work like that. Just because you suppress your magic an awful amount, that doesn’t mean that—“

“I know, okay? Just—drop it. Please.”

“No,” Eva said, and I snapped my head to glare at her. “Not unless you promise that you let me help you control your magic.”

“No.”

“I can help!”

“I don’t care. I don’t need your help.”

“But—“

“That’s my final answer.”

Eva opened her mouth to argue further, but then she closed it again. Now it was her turn to stare at the pier alongside the route of our tram. And while she looked at the ships, massive even among the buildings surrounding them, I was looking at her. I could only see her profile but I could still tell. The fight didn’t leave her eyes.

*

Eva being a member of _Los Losers_ was, of course, a secret, not one though that I ever guessed during our _Truth or Dare_ games. Actually, it took months of dating until I figured it out. And okay, “figuring out” might be a generous description of what really went down. It was more of a stupid slipup on Eva’s part, and well— destiny on mine if I want to be honest.

It happened on a date that we no longer referred to by a number. By that point, we lost count how many times we had met up. 

I had a rough day, and again, that’s also a generous adjective to use for that particular day. I got fired, you know. From the coffee shop, because someone did file a complaint against me. Unlike Eva’s would have been, it was completely unwarranted. The guy was a douche bag. I simply misspelled his name, which, by the way, he had totally mumbled, on his freaking cup (I wrote Jan instead of Jon). So, he left a complaint about me. Go figure.

“He is a douche bag,” Eva said, but it didn’t help.

“A regular jackass,” Eva said, but it didn’t help.

“You should have punched him. Or, pour his stupid coffee on him,” Eva said which, hours later than I could have actually done either of those things, also didn’t help.

Then, Eva pulled me closer, stroking my hair gently.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she whispered, because she knew I didn’t feel like it was okay.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered, because she knew that it felt like it was.

“Everything is gonna be fine,” she whispered although she couldn’t have known it would be.

Then she whispered this, and I forgot about the whole sacking (at least for the time being). “You know why? Because you are strong, Vilde. Good. Beautiful. Worthy.”

Strong.

Good.

Beautiful.

Worthy.

I had heard those words before in this exact order. I stared at Eva, though it wasn’t easy in the position we were sitting, so close, Eva’s fingers still running through my hair.

“You did the blue lilies,“ I blurted out. “The graffities by the Sognsvann Lake. You are one of them, aren’t you?”

Eva dropped her hand.

*

I am not lying when I say that at first it didn’t feel like the fact that Eva was a part of _Los Losers_ had a defining effect on our relationship. I made it clear that I didn’t want to do anything with magic, but also that I didn’t mind that Eva was doing magic. Eva promised that this worked for her and we left it at that.

I am not lying when I say we had nice moments in that period. If I think back on it now, those days felt like ones suspended in time. I was neither someone totally outside of the world of _Los Losers_, nor a part of it. I was on a brink of a decision but I wasn’t yet aware that I had to make it.

So I enjoyed knowing Eva’s secret just like I enjoyed that I wasn’t involved in it.

This was the time too when I invited Eva over for the first time. At first, having her in my room felt bizarre. Not because she did not fit into the room, but precisely because she did. I kept expecting to feel weird having her there, but the weirdness of it never kicked in. It just—felt right.

I was watching her endeared as she was slowly walking around, picking up the photo of me and Mom from my nightstand, then putting it back down, touching the blouse I had tossed onto my bed that morning, stopping in front of my small bookcase, scanning the titles. She chuckled when she reached one of my readings from the seminars.

“_If You Cannot Pull Off Pointy Hats, Don’t Use Magic_,” she read. “You know I don’t get it.”  


“What don’t you get?”

I thought she was going to flip over the seminars themselves and lecture me about how pointless they were (she would have been right), but as always, Eva surprised me.

“The pointy hat thing,” she said. “What does that have to do with magic? Like seriously? Earlier everyone used magic, and big deal, some of them wore stupid hats. If it was any kind of sign, it certainly wasn’t of magic use. Rather—I don’t know. Poor sense of fashion.”

I grinned. “Now it could be though. A sign of magic use.”

Eva, interest peaked, crooked her eyebrow.

I continued. “You said you were gonna reveal yourselves one day. You could do it wearing pointy hats to make fun of—you know, that,” I pointed at the seminar book.

Suddenly, without any warning, Eva pulled me into a kiss.

“Yeah, let’s do that,” she agreed, laughing into my mouth.

This is still the plan, by the way; I imagine by the time you get this letter, we have already done it. It will be an Instagram photo of all five of us wearing pointy hats, with a caption that goes like this: _ “We can totally pull these off.” _

*

Most of the times, lies don’t sound lies when you first hear them. Not so surprisingly, the most painful lies sound like truths for the longest time. Then _bam_.

Eva told me that because I had already known about her, it wouldn’t be a problem if she brought me to the _Los Losers_ headquarters. So she did. And let me tell you something. Not about the headquarters, I’m not sure I should trust you with that information. No, I’ll tell you about my initial reaction to seeing the other members for the first time.

There was Chris who cheerily hugged me the moment we stepped through the door.

There was Sana— and we will circle back to her.

There was Noora who exchanged some sort of secret _‘Are you sure about her?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’_ exchange with Eva, and only after that offered a kind smile.

And you know, there are two names one has to consider on the opposite side of _Los Losers_. One of them is— well, you know your own name. The other is Noora Amalie Sætre. Noora, as you’re probably aware, was one of the head-writers of Dagbladet, a talented reporter with “sharp wit and relentless curiosity” (not my words, but—true), but more importantly, she was the face of the fight against those who wanted to “corrupt our pitch-perfect system”. She precisely rose in the ranks so fast and so high because she was amongst the first ones who took _Los Losers_ seriously and started publicly criticizing them.

I’m using past tense because long before this letter reaches you, Noora will step down as the head-writer. But that doesn’t matter here (Noora will probably tell you all about it though), the point is this.  


Seeing Noora among _Los Losers_ was a shock (to say the least), a glitch in the system. It went against everything I thought I knew about _Los Losers_ and expected them to be like. 

I am pretty sure that previously I thought of revolutions (and I did not have any doubt in my mind that _Los Losers_ were leading a revolution) as some kind of war that was fought on fields with weapons and won by the party who was stronger. And maybe it was like that (well, without maybe actual fields), but I definitely was wrong when I defined what _Los Losers_‘ strength was. Because it was not magic, everyone had magic, not even the guts it took to use the magic, those ignorant _Penetrators_ also used magic; it was cleverness. This revolution was sure to be fought one day, but right then it looked more like a chess game where _Los Losers_ were able to calculate their opponents’ moves long before they even thought of those moves. Noora’s presence there was the very proof of that.

But back to me and Sana and Eva.

You know what else is usual in a chess game? Deceiving the other player, in other words, lying.  


The first words Sana said to me were these, “I’m glad you wanted to join us.”

I needed a moment to process this. _Joining them?_

“I don’t,” I stammered in the end, and glanced in confusion at Eva. She had the decency to look embarrassed.

Sana caught on impressively fast, way before I could come up with something to say.

“You lied,” she snapped at Eva at once. “You told us she wanted to join! What were you thinking? Why is she here if she doesn’t want to join? What? You just wanted to show her around?” Sana didn’t let Eva even slip a word in. “I thought you learned the lesson after Jonas, but I guess not.”

“Oh, come on,” Eva interrupted her at last. “It wasn’t like that and you know it.”

Sana shot daggers at Eva but said nothing.

I, however, finally found my voice. “I don’t know it,” I said in a quiet voice.

Eva, if that was possible, and I guess it was then, looked even more cornered than before. And that’s when it clicked.

Sometimes lies did sound like truths.

“_You_ wanted me to join, didn’t you?” I realized. “That was the part you lied about, right?”

“Vilde… I just—“

“And when I said that I didn’t want to use magic, and that I didn’t want to learn how to control it on my own, and you seemingly accepted it—that was another lie.”

I saw the moment when Eva decided to fight back. It was the intensity firing up in her eyes, it was the soft girl holding a coffee cup complimenting her smile turning into the girl who was secretly a member of a so-called crime ring.

“You said it yourself,” she shot back, “that you were working yourself to death. You expected me to just sit back and let you? Even after you messed up that dude’s name and lost the coffee shop job, you went ahead and found an even more demanding position. With your salary, you could afford four or five pills for a day both for your mother and yourself. I’d ask what for but the worst part is that I’m not even sure that you don’t take as much! Where does that leave you, Vilde? For fuck’s sake, you’re slowly killing yourself, and you expect me to just shrug and say, _ ‘hey, that’s your decision, babe’_?

“YES! Yes, Eva, I expected you to do exactly that. Because guess what. IT WAS MY FUCKING DECISION. HELL. IT IS.”

“THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT A RIDICULOUS DECISION!”

“I’M SORRY I MISSED THE PART WHERE YOU BEING AN OUTLAW MAGICIAN TURNED OUT TO BE A GREAT IDEA?!”

My blood was rushing in my veins, my head was pounding. Eva and I were standing face to face, the others, while they didn’t leave us alone, shuffled back in the room. We stared at each other, catching our breath. Then, Eva, in a much calmer voice, spoke again.

“You don’t have to join—“

“What do you—“, started Sana from behind, but the others shushed her.

“Just let me help you,” Eva said. “We have a supply of suppressants. We don’t use them, so they’re kinda piling up. With those, we can ease your way into self-control. Just—please. I wanna help.”

“Well, I don’t need your help,” I spat. “And you know what, I don’t need anything else from you either.”

You remember how I messed up my meet-cute with Eva? Look out for the irony that I kind of nailed our break-up. It was movie-worthy the way I stormed out of the head-quarters. That move I was proud of. Less so of what I did next.

Did you catch from my wonderful recollection of the dialogue the part where Eva said that they had a whole supply of suppressants? 

Yeah.

(It wasn’t too hard to find the storage room, it— but you know what, no more intell for you about the headquarters.) Anyway, not my proudest moment.

*

How I ended up going ever back then, you ask. No, scratch that, new question. How I ended up wanting to _join_ them?

It started off, just like many things in this story, with a blue lily. I found it on mom’s nightstand a week after I had left the _Los Losers_ headquarters. Eva had bombarded me with messages and calls the whole week. I had never answered her.

But not only Eva had been on my back, I had had to set my pettiness aside and write an e-mail back to Sana, swearing that their secret was safe with me. After that, at least she hadn’t called me again. (Neither of them had mentioned the suppressants, by the way, at least not in the messages I had seen.)  


The blue lily was, however, new. 

I didn’t go closer. Just like I didn’t want to hear Eva’s voicemails, I didn’t want to hear what her blue would have said. My grand plan was putting in my headphones and turning my music so high up that I wouldn’t hear a thing beside it. Then, I would simply toss the flower into the trash can. My iPad was already in my hand, the plan in motion, when I heard the quiet, sleep-heavy voice of Mom.

“Such a pretty lily, isn’t?”

I gaped at her, and only when she actually turned towards me in the bed, I remembered that I ought to say something to that.

“Yes.”

Simple.

“Did you know that in China they use lilies at weddings?” Mom asked. “They believe them to be a symbol of a love lasting for a hundred years.”

“Oh.” I sat down onto the bed, next to Mom. Her hand reached out from beneath the blankets, and she laced her fingers together with mine. “I didn’t know that. I thought that—they just looked nice.”

“Well, that’s what the Chinese believe at least. Flowers have a lot of different meanings, mostly depending on who’s looking at a particular flower.”

Mom was gazing at the lily with a tired, but soft smile on her lips and she was awake and she was speaking to me. I couldn’t tell her what this lily meant, and that it came from magic.

“I like it,” she said, and I squeezed her hand.

We were there for a long time, holding onto each other, marveling in a simply looking blue lily. Only when Mom fell asleep again and I finally stepped close to the vaze, I realized. The lily wasn’t the same kind I saw on the graffities by the Sognsvann Lake. No matter how close I held it to myself, it did not say a thing, and no matter how long I inspected it from up close, it did not move an inch. It looked like—honestly, it looked like an ordinary blue lily. And for the first time, since I had it, I questioned whether the lily was meant for me at all.

*

It was a Sunday morning when the blue lily, turning out to be a regular blue lily, died. Her pedals, almost all brown now, pathetically sat around the centre, and its water was muddy from those pedals that had already fallen off.

I checked Mom, fast asleep in the bed, then, I looked back at the lily. 

Before all of this, I had never really understood how a magic trick came to be. Any magic that I had done was accidental, my concentration slipping away, my body being spent losing its control over itself. It felt like magic was something one stumbled over if they weren’t careful enough. I didn’t know what it was like when you wanted to find it.

I traced the petals with my fingertips, one broke into pieces under my touch.

I punched in Eva’s contact in my phone without thinking over whether it was a good idea or not.

_“Can you be at our meet-cute place in half an hour?” _

*

Have I already mentioned that Eva had the best entrances? No, well, she did. She really should have been the confident bartender in our meet-cute scenario, because if one of us could come up with a killer opening, that’s Eva. So, now that I built up this moment in your head, let’s jump to the part when Eva arrived at the coffee shop. I was at the counter, waiting for my order to arrive, when Eva spoke up behind me.

“Isn’t that also a meet-cute trope when there are two customers with a very similar order and the bartender messes up them? And when the two of them realize, they giggle about the whole thing, falling for each other between two giggles?”

I turned around. “Have you ordered yet?”

“No. Shoot,” Eva said with a wary smile. “Rooky mistake.”

I did not return the smile, and instead, I remarked, “You sure have a lot of those recently.”

Eva crooked her eyebrow challengingly at me.

“You stole our medication supply.”

“You broke into my mom’s room,” I retorted.

“That’s fair. Okay. I did that.”

“And, for the record, I didn’t steal _all_ of your supply,” I said.

“Lucky us,” Eva said.

“Your order,” the bartender said. (She must have been my replacement because I didn’t recognize her.)

I took my coffee to the same table we sat at our horrendous first date, with Eva right behind me, but hey, not that this conversation was shaping up to be any less uncomfortable than that.

“I don’t take four or five suppressants a day,” I declared as soon as we sat down.

And okay, if Eva had impressive openings, at least in hindsight, I had weird ones. Eva, not surprisingly, looked at me puzzled.

“Neither does my mom. She takes three at most, I usually two,” I continued without offering any explanation on where this was coming from. “So the lack of suppressants is not why I work so much, well, not all of why I work so much.”

“Then…? I don’t understand.”

“I told you once, didn’t I? It’s the same reason why I’m taking more suppressants. Because I don’t wanna end up as a lump in a bed.” 

I swallowed down a sip of coffee as if it could stop the shakiness of my voice. I didn’t dare to look at Eva, see her pity, her kindness, or her _‘That’s stupid, I’ve told you it doesn’t work like that’_. But she didn’t interrupt me, she was waiting for me to continue.

“As long as I was working, doing as much as I possibly could, I wasn’t a lump.”

“Oh, Vilde…”

I ignored Eva and took another sip. I knew that unless I got though all of what I wanted to say in one go, I wouldn’t be able to finish it.

“But you were right,” I added. “I feel tired. All the time. Like there is this weight on me that I’m carrying around. Hence the supply-stealing and considering of doing magic.”

“What?! Are you seriously?”

Now, I looked up. Eva, sitting across from me, watched me wide-eyed, a hopeful smile playing on her lips.

“That’s why I asked you to meet me. I want you to teach me how to do magic.”

Eva’s smile widened.

*

Magic wasn’t something one stumbled over if they weren’t careful enough. It was a delicate, complicated thing you fought for. It was imagining the result you wanted to see, then, concentrating so hard on it that eventually the image ripped through the realm of possibilities and became something solid and existing.

It was like the balancing act we played with Mom, except this time, every nice, happy thing we could have come up with could have been real. 

It was like imagining perfect scenarios, meet-cutes and whatnots, except if I wanted, I could have pulled coffee cups with flirty messages on them out of thin air.

Eva and I sat cross-legged on the floor in my room, around us blue lilies. All of them made of magic but otherwise ordinary-looking. If I closed my eyes, then opened them real fast, for a moment I could trick myself into thinking that we were actually in a meadow where only lilies grew.

Imagine the perfect date, finally this was it. 

It was the two of us creating lilies with magic. It was Eva in my room. It was her laugh in our kiss. It was me, first time since forever not taking a suppressant at eight o’clock. It was us having dinner with Mom. It was Eva sleeping over and brushing our teeth together. It was a confession of _‘I want to do something. To help.’_ between kisses, and Eva’s answer _‘I know an organization you could join.’_ (I laughed and said _‘I’m in.’ _) It was Eva pressing her back to my front, and my arm circling her waist, the scent of her shampoo in my nose, the ghosts of her kisses all over my skin.

*

It was days after I had said that after all I had _wanted_ to join _Los Losers_, that we went back to the headquarters, and Noora and Chris gleefully welcomed me (and the supply I brought back with me) while Sana said _’if all of you are sure, I guess’_. Then, days later, Sana came up to me. I expected a conversation with her, but, because I didn’t know Sana that well at the time, I did not expect the bluntness of her approach to that conversation.

“Why are you here?”

It was the same question she had asked Eva when she had brought me to the headquarters for the first time. I shook my head as if I had been able to clear the memory from my head that easily.

I wanted to answer Sana that I was there because of Eva. And in some simplified, clean-cut way, that was true. It’s just wasn’t all of the truth.

“Have you ever felt this—unshakeable tiredness?” I started. “Not one that you would feel after a long and hard day of work, but one that you feel even those days when you didn’t do anything exhausting, anything special. It feels like having a coat on, one of those big winter coats that you only wear when it’s so cold that your teeth clatter. And you see, no matter what you do, you can never get rid of that stupid coat. Not even when it’s warm outside and life seems easy and everything a bit lighter. The coat is always there, sitting heavily on your shoulders. Have you felt anything like this?”

I shakily exhaled, and waited for Sana to say something. She took a long time to do so. But finally, she furrowed her eyebrows and nodded.

“I used to be the favorite child in my family,” she said. “Of course, my parents never said so, and I think, they tried to convince themselves that they don’t have one. But we all knew. Them, me, and my brother, Elias, too. I was the child that my family expected big things from, doing well in school and then going to study medicine and becoming a doctor, being a good Muslim, marry a nice man, and so on. How I practice Islam has always been my choice, but not staying strong in my faith has never been an option.”

I considered this, then, I said, “It sounds tiresome. To have all this pressure on you.”

To my surprise, Sana shook her head. “It wasn’t. I mean sure, it was sort of a pressure, but I didn’t mind it. My faith was important to me, I wanted to be a doctor and studying hard for it wasn’t ever an issue. And _of course_, I wanted someone nice as my husband. What my parents imagined for my life to look like wasn’t far from what I imagined it to be.”

“Then? What happened? I mean—you aren’t a doctor.”

“Astute observation, blondie.”

“I didn’t mean it as a—“

“I’m just messing with you, don’t worry. Yeah, I didn’t become a doctor. Just like my brother didn’t turn out to be the family disappointment. You may have heard of him by the way. Elias Bakkoush.”

“Oh.”

“I take that as a ‘yes, you’ve heard of him’. Ironically, it was because of him that I felt the—coat, as you called it, on my shoulders. It wasn’t pressure. It was guilt. Whenever I got a good grade in school, or even when I simply went to the mosque with my mom, I felt terrible, like I was somehow hurting Elias. I could tell myself that it was stupid, but I still couldn’t shake the uneasiness of it.” Sana looked at me with a sad smile on her face. “It’s not the same I know, but I do understand how that—coat feels like, Vilde.”

Sana stopped for a second and regarded me. I had the sensation that her eyes saw through me.

Then quietly, so much more quietly, she asked, “Do you still feel it?”

“Do you?”

Sana broke into a miniscule smile.

“Not when I’m here,” she said, then looked at me expectantly.

I thought of Eva’s laugh, and I thought of the lilies guarding the entrance of the _Los Losers_ headquarters. 

I returned Sana’s smile. “Me neither.”

*

The first day of school sucks. One comes into a new place, among new people, everyone is confused and shy, and those who appear like they are not, are just better at pretending. You all are unsure where you should stand and what your role is supposed to be.

You know what sucks even more badly? Coming into a new school in the middle of a school year, because you see, in this scenario everyone already has a place to stand, a role to fill in; you are the only one confused. This was how it felt to join _Los Losers_ months after they had already formed their group, and how I felt during the first few weeks among them. 

You see, Eva, Sana, Noora, Chris, they all had their thing, and while I was enthusiastic, for this most insecurity-driven time, I could not figure out how I could contribute to what they were already doing exceptionally well. Naturally, I asked the source of any information worth having, Sana.

Sana—you know Sana, always says such nice things, but most of the time she does not mean them as nice things. She merely states them as facts and observations or wraps them in criticism or complaints, and you, especially if you do not know Sana that well, interpret them as such. It often happens that one only later discovers that what Sana said is actually something profoundly and undeniably _nice_. Like for example, Sana would always complain how stubborn I was, but only when she answered my question, I realized that all along she meant it as a compliment.

“Everyone is essential, _Vilde_,“ she said. “Eva is our heart, Noora is the head, Chris the spirit, and you—you are the resilience.”

“And what are you?” I asked in return.

“The voice of reason,” Sana said challengingly, then her eyes softened and she looked at me almost shyly. “The faith?”  


I smiled at her encouragingly. “That makes sense.”  


Each description did actually, so later on when we scooped up all the litter gathering in the parks of Oslo (yes, this was our newest project, and yes, it did take us a few hours even with magic) and left blue lilies in their places, I could not help but notice that some of the lilies spoke, in hushed, tiny voices, spreading kindness to anyone who leaned close enough to the ground to hear them. _The heart, indeed._

“They’re pretty,” I told Eva, but Sana scoffed.

“They have to do the job, telling the world we did this. It doesn’t matter if they are pretty or not.”

I looked at Eva’s magic-made lilies again, all blue and soft looking, and nodded.

“It doesn’t,” I allowed, “but they still are.”

*

That’s a nice moment to end this story on, right? At least, for now. I’m sure the others will tell you a bunch, too. (Word of advice though: don’t believe half of the things Chris will say.) But the gist of my journey is this. The rest? Well, the rest, most of the fighting for that better world I’m imaging, is still ahead of us. I hope that one day you change your mind and join our fight. Sana would sure love it.

One more thing. In the beginning I said I’m writing this mostly because Sana asked me to. But there is another reason, too, and it may be a silly one, but here we go. 

You remind me of myself. A lot actually. I know there is much to your story that Sana hasn’t told us, but the bits she has— Once, I was also afraid, you know. (Well, you do, I’ve just told you about it.) But the thing I realized that I was not afraid of magic itself, not even of doing something. I was afraid of stopping. I knew how to stay afloat, it was working, working, working. It was taking care of my mom. It was swallowing down a bunch of suppressants. It was avoiding magic at all cost. 

I thought if I stopped swimming, I would drown. 

But the thing is, water doesn’t work like that. For a while you can float. You can also look for something to hold onto. You can get on a freaking boat. So, just because you are hunting down everyone accused of performing magic on purpose _now_, that doesn’t mean you always have to do the hunting. You can stop whenever you want, it’ll be okay.

Take care and well—I hope we’ll meet soon, Elias.

**Author's Note:**

> FYI: I'm planning to write a series of five stories in this world, one for each of the girls. I don't know when I'll have the time to actually do this, but yeah, that's it for now.


End file.
